Mark gospel Alleged first century manuscript
- The rumor: In 2012, reports circulated, notably from New Testament scholar Daniel B. Wallace, that a first-century fragment of Mark had been found and confirmed by a leading papyrologist, though it was under a non-disclosure agreement. This led to widespread speculation and hype, fueled in part by Christian apologetic circles.
- The truth: When the fragment was finally published in 2018 as P137 (P.Oxy. 5345), its late-second to early-third century date became known. The early dating was found to be a claim made in a private sale attempt, not a scholarly consensus.
- The scandal: P137 was at the center of a controversy involving papyrologist Dirk Obbink and the Museum of the Bible, which had acquired papyri from Obbink that were later found to be the property of the EES.
- The claim: In 1972, papyrologist José O'Callaghan argued that a tiny Greek fragment from a Qumran cave, 7Q5, was a piece of Mark 6:52–53. Since the text from Qumran predates 68 AD, this would make it a first-century manuscript.
- The overwhelming rejection: The majority of biblical scholars reject O'Callaghan's identification. The reconstruction of the text requires assuming scribal errors and an otherwise unattested variant of Mark's text to make it fit.
There are reports of alleged first-century fragments of the Gospel of Mark, most notably the one announced by Dan Wallace in 2011, which was found in a Egyptian mummy mask, or cartonnage, along with other writings. While the initial claims generated significant interest, there is no strong consensus on the fragment's authenticity or date, with some scholars disputing the evidence. Other possibilities include the "Secret Gospel of Mark," but the existence of a related manuscript is also highly debated, with accusations of forgery and misrepresentation.
- A fragment of the Gospel of Mark was discovered in a mummy mask made from layers of reused papyrus.
- Dr. Dan Wallace announced the fragment in 2011, claiming a first-century dating based on paleography (handwriting analysis) and carbon dating.
- There was significant debate among scholars, with some considering the announcement premature or misleading due to the lack of consensus and the fragment's nature (a small scrap of text).
- This is another debated text, rumored to have been discovered by Morton Smith.
- Accusations of forgery were leveled against Smith for the Secret Gospel of Mark, and the lack of original, scientifically verifiable manuscripts continues to fuel suspicion.
- The process of extracting texts from mummy masks involves destroying valuable cultural artifacts, raising an ethical question about the justification for their removal versus the potential discovery of biblical texts.
First-Century Copy of Mark? – Part 1
On February 1, I had a public debate in Chapel Hill with Daniel Wallace, a conservative evangelical Christian New Testament scholar who teaches at that bastion of conservative dispensationalist theology, Dallas Theological Seminary. He is also the author of several books, including Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament and Reinventing Jesus. I have known Dan for over thirty years, since we were both graduate students interested in similar areas of research: my field (at the time I too was an evangelical) was textual criticism, the study of the ancient Greek manuscripts of the New Testament and of what they can tell us about the “original” writings of the New Testament; his field was the grammar of the Greek New Testament.
The term “textual criticism” is a technical term. It does not refer to any study of “texts.” It is specifically the study of how to establish what an author wrote if we do not have his or her actual writings, but only later copies of them. In the case of the New Testament we have a highly ironic and problematic situation on our hands. We have thousands and thousands of later copies of the New Testament. But none of our copies are the originals or copies of the originals or copies of the copies of the originals.
The vast majority of our copies are from many hundreds of years after the originals. That in itself is not a problem, apart from a related circumstance. All of these surviving copies are different from other another, giving different wording for this verse and that verse, up and down the line, page after page over the entire New Testament. We don’t know how many differences there are among our surviving copies – by last count we had some 5560 copies in the original Greek language of the New Testament – but they appear to number in the hundreds of thousands. Most scholars think that there are some 300,000 or 400,000 differences among these copies.
The vast majority of these differences are completely unimportant, immaterial, insignificant, and don’t matter for a thing, other than to show that ancient Christian scribes could spell no better than most people can today. (And they didn’t have spell check! In fact, they didn’t even have dictionaries.) But some of the differences matter a lot, affecting how a verse, or a passage, or even an entire book is to be interpreted. When you change what the words of a text are, you obviously also change what the words of the text mean! And so it matters which words were originally written.
Over the thirty years since I first met Dan I have engaged in serious and rigorous research in textual criticism. It was the subject of my Master’s thesis at Princeton Theological Seminary. And then of my PhD dissertation. I have published seven books on the subject and lots of articles in scholarly journals. It is the field that I devoted the first twenty years of my research career to. Over that time I moved away from being an evangelical Christian who believed not only that we could reconstruct the very words of the original authors of the New Testament, but who also believed those very words were inspired by God.
The public debate that I had with Dan – who has himself remained a committed evangelical Christian over all these years – was about the former question. It was not over whether the words of the New Testament were inspired by God. It was over whether we can know with relatively complete confidence what these words are.
It is not surprising that Dan thinks we can know what they are. It would make little sense to say the words were inspired if in fact we don’t have the words. What good would it have been for God to inspire words that are now lost? I on the other hand have come to realize that despite our best efforts, we will never be able to know what those words were in many instances. We simply don’t have the kinds of evidence that are needed to be confident that our reconstructed texts – based on copies that are all full of mistakes from hundreds of years later – are exactly what the authors wrote.
In other blogs I will discuss various aspects of that question. Here I simply want to point out one issue that came up during our debate.
In the debate I pointed out that our earliest copy of the Gospel of Mark was P45 (called this because it is the 45th Papyrus [hence “P”] manuscript to be catalogued), which dates to around the year 200 CE – i.e., 140 years after Mark was first written. That’s our earliest copy. Between the original of Mark and our earliest copy there were something like fourteen decades of copying, and recopying, and recopying of Mark. Year after year it was copied. And the copies were being changed at every point. And then later copies were copies of the earlier changed copies. Then those earlier changed copies were lost; as were the copies based on them; and the copies based on them. Until our earliest surviving copy, P45 – which itself is not a complete copy of Mark, but highly fragmentary. Our first complete copy of Mark dates to around the year 360 – nearly three hundred years (count them 300 years) after the “original” of Mark.
In his response to my discussion in the debate, Dan made a surprise announcement. We now have a first-century copy of Mark, he told the astonished audience (and the astonished Bart). When asked, he would not, or could not, tell us very much about this first-century copy of Mark. But it is obviously very important to know the details:
- How extensive is this copy? Is it a complete copy of Mark? Or a fragment? If it is a fragment, how much text is found on it? Twelve chapters? Two verses? It obviously makes an enormous difference! But Dan would not say.
- How was it dated? Dan would not say.
- Who dated it? Dan would not say
- Has anyone corroborated the dating by rigorous testing. Dan would not say.
All Dan would say is that the manuscript had been discovered; it had been dated by a renowned (but unnamed) palaeographer (i.e., expert in ancient handwriting: that’s how ancient manuscripts are dated, by analyzing the handwriting) who “had no theological bias” (I was not sure why Dan made that point; what does theology have to do with the dates of ancient handwriting); and that it would be published by the respectable publishing house E. J. Brill “in about a year.”
I have lots to say about this remarkable announcement, some of which I will say here in this public forum and some of which I will reserve for my membership site. For this forum, I should say, first of all, that it struck me at the time and still strikes me now as a rather strange debating point for Dan to have made, and it makes me wonder if it really was simply to “score a point” rather than to provide helpful information. In effect what he was saying was that contrary to my claim, there was in fact a copy of Mark from near the time of original, that he had evidence that would counteract my views. But, in effect what he is saying is: “I won’t tell you anything about this evidence! Trust me on this one!”
I really don’t think a public debate is the place to raise evidence that you are not willing to talk about, and that if you aren’t willing to state what exactly the evidence is, then you shouldn’t bring it up (I have evidence, but I won’t tell you about it).
Moreover, I don’t understand why there is so much secrecy about this “manuscript.” Why NOT tell us where it was found, who found it, how extensive it is, who has examined it, what his grounds for dating it were, whether his views have been independently corroborated? Is it so more people will buy the book when it comes out? Is this secrecy driven by a profit motive? If not, why the secrecy?
Dan has been repeatedly asked for more information, and he will not give it. I don’t know if he owns the manuscript, if he has seen the manuscript, if it is his book that will contain information about the manuscript, or anything else. The one piece of information that I have been able to gather is that we are not talking about a large manuscript with lots of text on it (say, several chapters, let alone all of the Gospel of Mark). It appears to be a scrap of papyrus with parts of a few verses on it.
The other thing I will say about this entire business is that publishing such a scrap as a book rather than in an academic journal where claims can be evaluated and reassessed by real scholars in the field is a very poor way to promote scholarship.
But let’s say that the dating is right, and that now we have a scrap of Mark from the first century. Let me be the first to say that I think that would be absolutely fantastic! It would be great! May many more appear!
Dan has gone on record as saying that this will be a discovery as significant as one of the Dead Sea Scrolls (see more here). He is wrong about that. In fact, if it is just a scrap, as it appears to be, then it probably will not change a single, solitary thing in the entire field of New Testament textual criticism.
Finally! Now We Know. The “First-Century Copy” of Mark
I have posted on and off over the past six or seven years about an allegedly first-century copy of the Gospel of Mark that some scholars claimed we had now in our possession. This would be by far the earliest manuscript we have of any part of the New Testament, a matter of real importance and interest. But it turns out NOT to be that, and it has involved a real academic farce.
Those of you who have followed this charade know most of the important facts, but for those of you who don’t, and just to remind those of you who do, let me set them out, before explaining the new development:
In 2012 I was holding a public debate on whether we can know what the authors of the New Testament “originally” wrote, given the fact that we don’t have their original writings but only later copies of them, all of them different in many, many small ways and sometimes in more important ways. Virtually all of these copies are many centuries removed from the originals. The debate was held in Memorial Hall at UNC Chapel Hill with Dan Wallace, a Professor of New Testament at the conservative evangelical Dallas Theological Seminary (you can see the debate on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kg-dJA3SnTA&t=4770s), and author of Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament, and Reinventing Jesus, among others.
One of the points I always argue in this kind of debate is that we simply don’t have early manuscripts to help us know what the originals of the New Testament said. I usually use Mark as an example. Mark’s Gospel was written around 70 CE. We don’t have any copy of any kind of Mark until around 200 CE – and that copy is highly fragmentary: it contains *portions* (sometimes just a few verses) of just eight of the Gospels sixteen chapters. don’t have a complete Gospel until around 370 CE. That is to say, the *first* full copy is 300 years after the original, 300 years during which the book had been copied, and recopied, and recopied, with all the copyists making small or big mistakes (and then of course the errant copies are copied by scribes who make further mistakes and their copies are copied and… and so it goes for three centuries before we have any copy based on these copies of the copies of the copies.)
Given that state of affairs, how can we possibly know what Mark himself wrote? We usually suppose (or at least I do) that we have a pretty good idea for most of the pasages of the book. But can we be *sure*? And in *all* places? My view is: we *can’t*. There are lots and lots of places, some of them significant, where we simply don’t know and can’t know.
During the debate, Dan wanted to argue that we have excellent manuscript copies of the NT and Mark in particular, and in that context he delivered a real stunner. He meant it as a zinger to blow me out of the water. He indicated that a previously unknown and unannounced copy of Mark’s Gospel had been discovered that had been reliably dated by one of the world’s experts to the *first* century! Yikes! Now THAT could change things.
But he wouldn’t tell me, or the crowd, anything about the manuscript.
This announcement created a HUGE stir in the community of scholars committed to textual criticism. Massively talked about and discussed. And Dan would never reveal any more information about it, other than that the text was going to be published soon and that he had signed a non-disclosure agreement making it impossible for him to provide any further information. The issue kept coming up and continued to be discussed for years.
As it turns out, the whole thing was a farce, as many of us suspected and all of us learned for certain a year or so ago.
And now we know how it all happened, as of yesterday.
For background, you might want to read some of the earlier posts I’ve devoted to the question over all this time. Here are some of them. If you want to see all of the relevant posts, simply search for First Century Mark (or first-century Mark) on the blog.
https://ehrmanblog.org/first-century-copy-of-mark-part-1-members/
https://ehrmanblog.org/we-do-not-have-a-first-century-copy-of-the-gospel-of-mark/
https://ehrmanblog.org/why-would-it-matter-if-there-were-a-first-century-copy-of-mark/
The explanation of what happened has now come forward from a representative of the Museum of the Bible in Washington D.C., a scholar named Mike Holmes, and the author of The Greek New Testament and The Apostolic Fathers. Mike and I have been good friends for forty years. He and I were the final two graduate students of the great textual expert Bruce Metzger at Princeton Theological Seminary. Mike himself is a fine scholar who retired a couple of years ago from a long career as University Professor of Biblical Studies and Early Christianity at Bethel College, an evangelical institution, and assumed duties at the newly established Museum of the Bible. He and I see each other regularly at annual meetings and stay in contact both professionally and personally (we have published two books together, one of them in two editions).
The context is this. This coming November, at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature meeting in San Diego, there will be a panel session devoted to the question of First-Century Mark. When it became clear last year that in fact First-Century Mark was NOT first century (when the tiny fragment was itself published and dated much later than the first century), I contacted the chairs of the New Testament Textual Criticism section of the SBL to suggest we have a panel discussion about the ethics and propriety of how the entire thing (I’m tempted to say scandal) developed, in connection with Dan Wallace’s announcement at the debate, to the people who had misled him to begin with, to the involvement of the Museum of the Bible, to the ways antiquities are generally handled in the academy, to… related issues… One of the chairs of this section at the SBL you know: Stephen Carlson, who has done those guest posts on Papias for the blog; the other I’ve mentioned before and has agreed to do some *future* guest posts (very soon, in fact), Jennifer Knust, Professor of Early Christianity at Duke, and author of To Cast the First Stone and Abandoned to Lust.
They agreed it would be a good idea. There will be a number of people doing various kinds of assessments of the whole affair, including me since I was involved in (or rather, the object of!) the first airing of the claims, and Mike Holmes, as a representative of the Bible Museum, since, as will become clear, the affair implicated the Museum itself, and Mike will explain what actually happened.
But in advance of the meeting, just yesterday, Mike sent all of us the first public explanation of how the fragment came to be (wrongly) touted as a spectacular find of the first century. I have attached the explanation here, below. I will explain it all further tomorrow, in case it needs a bit of unpacking (I think it probably does).
Short story. It appears — from what Mike has now been allowed to inform us – that it goes back to the expert on ancient manuscripts Dirk Obbink, a well-known professor at Oxford University. Obbink was responsible for publishing this small fragment of Mark in the long-running series called The Oxyrhynchus Papyri (a highly erudite enormous set of volumes devoted to papyri of all kinds discovered in digs started at the end of the 19th century in the ancient Egyptian city named Oxyrhynchus). Obbink did not *own* the fragment (it is owned by the British Egypt Exploration Society since it is a fragment discovered in Egypt during British archaeological digs), but he had it in his possession (since he was publishing the text with an analysis, he need to be given temporary possession of it). Nonetheless he claimed he *did* own it and he sold it to the Museum of the Bible, evidently for a lot of money (amount unspecified), based on a false claim that in fact it dated from around 100 CE – making it a very hot piece of papyrus indeed!
In fact he didn’t own it so that it wasn’t his to sell, and it didn’t date from 100 CE. We don’t know much more than that. But Mike has provided proof for the claims. Here they are: Contract and List of Four Gospel Fragments. Again, I’ll explain more fully in my next post.
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